Lessons Learned After Two Weeks Living On The Road

We thought we would share the things we've learned in the past two weeks. Some you might say to yourself, "Duh!"

1.Living in a 200 sq. ft. space isn’t as hard as we thought it would be. We realized, and did before we moved into the RV, that we only used a small portion of our 1,200 sq. ft. house.

2.Living in a 200 sq. ft. space can sometimes be hard – mainly because our two dogs like to follow us everywhere we go, even though they can see us from one room to another (we only have two rooms!). So when they are standing right behind us or laying in the middle of a room, there’s not enough space to walk around them.

3.Composting toilets are great!!! But there is a learning curve. It also takes a little while to wrap your head around not having to flush.

4.You shouldn't keep a residential refrigerator running while driving – it'll turn itself off while you drive and need to be properly restarted once you park. And you may shorten the life of it if you drive with the residential fridge on all the time.

5.But you can get away with using a residential refrigerator in an RV even though the directions say not to. (So far.) 6.11.16 Update: Our fridge is still working!

6.It’s even more important than usual to not piss off your partner, especially if it’s raining outside.

7.Plastic buckets with lids (3 and 5 gallons) are awesome. Ways we’ve used our plastic buckets: carried auxiliary fuel (waste vegetable oil), collected and stored drinking water (when it was too cold to use the RV plumbing), emptied our gray water tanks into them, storing dog food, storing recyclables until we can properly recycle them, equipment storage, and eventually laundry.

8.Messes get out of hand quickly in small spaces – this is very true for the RV. Keep piles out of sight!

9.When you don’t have running water but need to wash dishes, a bike water bottle is an excellent stand in for a faucet. It allows you to use small amounts of water to wash dishes.

10.We were reminded that we can only run a couple AC appliances at the same time, for example: we can run the space heater and electric tea kettle at the same time, but if the refrigerator tries to kick on then it’ll trip the breaker on the inverter.

11.We are even more conscious than before about our water and electricity usage.

12.I keep feeling guilty about driving the truck until I realize, “Hey, it’s running off WVO!”

13.We don’t have to worry about getting a ticket for speeding, but maybe for going under the speed limit.